Fire-ravaged Napa and Sonoma want visitors back in wine country

Share this:

Grapes are covered with ash at the destroyed Signorello Vineyards along the Silverado Trail in Napa on Tuesday. The Napa Fire destroyed many homes and businesses, including several wineries. - Jane Tyska — Bay Area News Group

Flames threatened Kenwood’s Chateau St. Jean during October’s wine country wildfires, sweeping the hillside just behind the winery, scorching trees and showering embers into the courtyard. The tasting room re-opened over Veteran’s Weekend. - Jackie Burrell — Bay Area News Group

Last month’s widespread fires north of San Francisco were the worst conflagration the California wine world has ever experienced. As the devastating and deadly blazes swept through Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties, and in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, rumor and misinformation spread as quickly as the devastation did.

Now, as wineries take more careful stock of their losses and the wine industry ponders how to better ward against future fire threats, the medium- and long-term effects of the fires are becoming clearer, and the inaccuracies and wrong assumptions that emanated from that wild week are coming to light. New worries have emerged as well.

A common complaint among people in the wine industry concerned the quality and tone of media coverage. Many considered it over-the-top and often inaccurate.

“The media kind of oversold it. I had friends from Austria calling and they thought the whole valley had burned down,” said Georg Salzner, president of Napa’s Castello di Amorosa. “I understand that kind of reporting, to an extent. When you’re covering a fire, you’re not going to show undamaged homes and wineries. But now it’s our job to convince people that it wasn’t so bad and the fires really affected only a small number of wineries here.”

All the talk about smoke taint — the disastrous taste of smoke in the wine that results when grapes are downwind from a blaze — was also overblown, according to Catherine Bugué, director of education at the Napa Valley Wine Academy. She estimates over 75 percent of Napa’s valuable cabernet sauvignon harvest was already plucked — along with nearly 90 percent of other varietals. And even the grapes that were still on the vine during the fires were largely unaffected, she believes.

“Most cabernet in the valley is from Oakville and points north,” Bugué said. “(Respected grape grower Andy) Beckstoffer said there was less smoke (in his vineyards) than in (the city of) Napa.”

Still, Beckstoffer wasted no time getting his grapes out of the field during the fire.

“He had 100 workers every day; they all wanted to do something. They had to wear masks,” Bugué said. “He picked it all and had it all delivered — over 4,000 tons. Nobody declined the fruit.”

Beckstoffer believes smoke taint will be extremely minimal, she said, not only because his vineyards avoided the heaviest smoke but because the fire happened late in the grapes’ maturation when their absorption rate is relatively low.

In the first week after the fire, reassuring stories such as Beckstoffer’s were common as winemakers and growers sought to persuade consumers the quality of the 2017 vintage will not be affected.

But few talked about another potentially devastating problem: Out-of-control fermentation at unattended wineries that lost power.

“If you’re fermenting sweet wine, say moscato or riesling, and nobody attends to it, it ferments all the way through its cycle and becomes dry,” Salzner said. “If you have red wine, it can get stuck at a certain stage of fermentation if it’s kept at the wrong temperature.”

Most wineries in Napa and Sonoma do not own emergency generators, and power was out for as long as a week in some areas. Police and emergency responders sometimes ordered winery staffers to abandon their facilities, and they weren’t able to get back for days in many cases.

“Nobody in my experience knows what happens when you walk away from a fermenting tank for four or five days,” said Stu Smith of Napa’s Smith-Madrone Vineyards. “No punch-down, no cooling — it will be an issue. You can bet the insurance companies will be looking at this, too.”

The subject of insurance is a tricky one for winemakers. Grapes are not customarily insured at every part of their growth and harvesting processes.

“In 2008, we had smoke taint,” Smith said. “Our insurance company said, ‘You’re insured from the moment the grapes hit the receiving hopper, but your grapes were damaged in the field, so you’re not covered for that.’ You can insure a crop, but you can’t insure the vines themselves.”

Trees can’t be sacred anymore

The other unresolved issue in the aftermath of the fires is their effect on wine tourism. The fires happened toward the end of harvest, traditionally one of the busiest times of year for Napa and Sonoma. There’s anecdotal evidence that many wine tourists heading to the area changed their minds.

“(The fires) have increased traffic to our region; it has been noticeable,” said Christopher Taranto, communications director of the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance. He represents a wine region 250 miles south of the fire zone.

“Today, there are a lot of pedestrians in downtown Paso for a Monday,” Taranto said. “You could tell they’re mostly tourists, not locals out for lunch. Wine tourists were committed to come to California, so many of them simply re-routed when the fires happened. A lot of our wineries did see new customers that were otherwise headed north.”

Smaller wineries are in greater danger than larger ones because of the dip in tourism, said Robyn Bentley, founder of Wine Country Consultants, a company that buys and sells vineyard estate properties. “It’s more hand-to-mouth with the smaller guys. They often sell most of their wine directly to the consumer in the tasting room or through a wine club. If people don’t show up, they will start hurting quickly.”

Bentley also mentioned a ripple effect for wine-dependent businesses, especially at this time of year when wine tourism is typically at its height: limousine services, restaurants and bars, hotels, delicatessens that make picnic lunches, and so on.

Looking forward, many in the wine industry generally agree some attitudes and practices will change because of the wildfires.

“I think we, as a community, need to be more responsible for our own fire safety,” said Smith. “If things look bad, we need to get out. And fundamentally, we need to take better care of our own properties.”

Trees, for example, need to be evaluated unsentimentally, Smith said. “It’s hard to cut down a mature oak or other big tree that’s hundreds of years old,” he said. But when Smith and others were fighting to save their property, they watched many mature trees light up quickly and intensely, “like giant candlesticks.”

Infrastructure also needs to be made more durable, Smith added.

“Cell phone towers should be more protected — built in a way that can withstand some harsh stuff. For a while there, we were living in the 20th century again.” When cell service went down, Smith and his crew had to listen to AM radio reports in their vehicles to find out where the fires might be headed.

Salzner thinks wineries of all sizes need to be more self-sufficient. “Generators for sure, people will definitely install more generators. If you lose one tank of wine, that’s enough to pay for a few generators.”

One unexpected silver lining of the fires is that the vineyards themselves turned out to be excellent firebreaks. That knowledge can be put to good use, winemakers agree.

“A lot of houses survived because they were protected by the vineyards,” Salzner said. Smith thinks it’s worth planning future vineyards to take advantage of that benefit.

“Our state senator, Bill Dodd, flew over this area after the fires and said that you can see everywhere where the fire came up to a vineyard and scorched the edges and then stopped. Why not checkerboard some of the hillsides with vineyards? That could be a really good barrier.”

As with any disaster, bad-news entrepreneurs showed up in the immediate aftermath of the blazes, looking for post-event bargains. For the wine industry in Napa and Sonoma, there aren’t any, Bentley said.

“Demand has outpaced supply for at least the last three years,” she said. “Business is still booming in Napa Valley. It will continue to make exceptional wine and attract people with means into the market. I got a call from a vintner who’s in the market for a vineyard. He said to let him know if anyone decides to sell. But the kind of property he’s hoping for doesn’t exist. There are no bargains out there. The fires didn’t seem to change that.”